Posts Tagged ‘Fantagraphics’

Happiness is a multi-billion dollar industry. People need help. And in this day and age, they need help navigating a veritable maelstrom of self-help options. Mindfulness workshops. Gratitude challenges. These wellness communities have sprung up all over, well intentioned, but not necessarily effective. Inner-strength and calm is a personal quest, made more elusive and difficult than ever before with the frenetic conditions we call modernity. It’s no laughing matter. But reading Eleanor Davis’s How to Be Happy might help you to do just that. Laugh.

“Such lovely epidemics…” Such horrific words, spoken by the basest of villains, gushing over his little test tube babies, cultivated with intent to decimate the human population. Scary stuff, evil is. And there’s plenty of it in in The Arctic Marauder, Fantagraphics‘ re-release (translated to English by co-founder Kim Thompson) of Jacques Tardi’sLe Demon des glaces. Originally published in 1974, this piece, early in Tardi’s oeuvre, has withstood the test of time, proven prescience, and only gained plausibility.

What do you get when you cross the film noir classic Double Indemnity with whimsy and pastels? You get The Wipeout, Italian writer/illustrator Francesca Ghermandi’s obscure little masterpiece. That’s what.

If you’ve read any of the Hernandez Brothers’Love and Rockets books and have not already fallen in love with Maggie Chascarillo, Jaime Hernandez’s newest Fantagraphics release will most certainly convince you otherwise. A coming of age story, without the candy coating we’ve come to expect, The Love Bunglers explores the complexity of growing up – the icky feelings that come with the loss of innocence, with parents and their children becoming peers, and the trade-offs that come with the acquisition of wisdom. And it does so without ever losing sight of the wonder of it all.

The Adventures of Jodelle is pure pop. In the best sense. A tale of espionage and betrayal set in ancient Rome, but all its decadence, bacchanalia, and frivolity rendered in the most modern sense. 1960’s modern, mind you, inspired by the famous Gottlieb pinball machines. So Rome is re-imagined as resembling some hybrid of the French Riviera and the Vegas strip, all neon and fluorescent, yet still flat, matte, and beautiful. Immediately recognized as a game changer, this book is all about the art – as in the work within, and the movement so definitive of the devastating cultural explosion that was the 1960’s.